Entries Tagged 'Other' ↓

Generate your own Github resumé

I’ve managed to get XBMC running (and good!). It took me a while to get everything to my liking. Almost everything works perfectly! Except sound is still a bit of a hassle. Linux (with pulseaudio) only sends analog sound through my s/pdif connection (aaarghh… forgot to draw in the schema ->) and not digital.

Maybe I’ll switch back to alsa. But then again: maybe not. It’s only connected to an old Yamaha amplifier I had laying around so I don’t think I’ll hear the difference.

I have a draft blog post in which I explain how I got everything running on Ubuntu 9.10. I’ll try and publish it as soon as I can And then I’ll update the schema too.

I read on OSnews about the alpha release of Haiku. It’s been several years since I installed BeOS the last time so I decided to try Haiku.

I first tried it on virtualbox but I didn’t get the networking to work flawlessly so I decided to install it on libvirt. I expected quite a hassle but it was done in a whissle.

First download the raw image of Haiku and run something like:

sudo virt-install --name="Haiku" --ram=512 --hvm --accelerate --import --file=/media/second_disk/vm-images/haiku-r1alpha1.image --vnc --bridge=virbr0

Next I had to edit the Haiku libvirt xml to change the default nic model.  I always stop the libvirt service just to be sure. Then edit this file: /etc/libvirt/qemu/Haiku.xml

Make sure the nic looks something like:

<interface type='bridge'>
<mac address='54:52:00:6a:14:17'/>
<source bridge='virbr0'/>
<model type='e1000'/>
</interface>

I first tried the rtl8139 interface but that isn’t supported by Haiku :s A list of possible interfaces can be found on the libvirt website.

I can now access it via vnc. But Ubuntu has some kind of bug in the vnc client of virt-viewer so it is sllooooooowwwww…

Tomato is a replacement firmware for Linksys’ WRT54GL and it rocks!

I’ve installed it on my home router and on the new router of my boss. Both had other routers ( a Belkin and a US Robotics) and a lot of troubles with the stupid things. After switching to Tomato we’ve had no troubles at all! Upgrading was a breeze.

At work we still have a D-link but the conncetion keeps dropping. If I set it to WPA1 OR WPA2: no troubles. But WPA1 AND 2 it can’t handle So one of these days I’ve got to pick up a nice blue Linksys and install Tomato on it.

We got a lot of complaints about legitimate mails being marked as spam and therefore not being delivered to our customers.  As a solution I wanted the mails to be delivered to the user’s .SPAM folder.

These is the configuration I decided on:

/etc/amavis/conf.d/20-debian_defaults:

$final_spam_destiny       = D_PASS;

/etc/maildroprc:

# Global maildrop filter file

# Uncomment this line to make maildrop default to ~/Maildir for
# delivery- this is where courier-imap (amongst others) will look.
DEFAULT="$HOME/Maildir"
SHELL="/bin/bash"
MAILDIRMAKE=`which maildirmake`
logfile "/var/log/maildrop.log"

`test -d $HOME/Maildir/.SPAM`
if ( $RETURNCODE == 1 )
{
`$MAILDIRMAKE -f SPAM $HOME/Maildir`
`echo INBOX.SPAM >> $HOME/Maildir/courierimapsubscribed`
}

if ( /^X-Spam-Status: Yes/ )
{
to "$HOME/Maildir/.SPAM/"
}

/etc/roundcube-webmail/main.inc.php:

// store spam messages in this mailbox
$rcmail_config['junk_mbox'] = 'SPAM';

// display these folders separately in the mailbox list.
// these folders will automatically be created if they do not exist
$rcmail_config['default_imap_folders'] = array('INBOX', 'Drafts', 'Sent', 'SPAM', 'Trash');

Delete all the old Junk-folders:

rm -r /home/*/Maildir/.Junk
rm -r /home/*/homes/*/Maildir/.Junk

To make it extra nice:
/etc/amavis/conf.d/50-user:

use strict;

#
# Place your configuration directives here.  They will override those in
# earlier files.
#
# See /usr/share/doc/amavisd-new/ for documentation and examples of
# the directives you can use in this file
#

#$log_level = 5;

$pax='pax';

read_hash(\%whitelist_sender, '/etc/amavis/whitelist');
read_hash(\%blacklist_sender, '/etc/amavis/blacklist');
read_hash(\%spam_lovers, '/etc/amavis/spam_lovers');

@bypass_spam_checks_maps = (
\%bypass_spam_checks, \@bypass_spam_checks_acl, \$bypass_spam_checks_re);

#------------ Do not modify anything below this line -------------
1;  # ensure a defined return

And:

touch /etc/amavis/whitelist
touch /etc/amavis/blacklist
touch /etc/amavis/spam_lovers

And restart amavis:

/etc/init.d/amavis restart

I download a Debian Sid livecd on my home server/HTPC and there’s a cd burner in there. So I would like to burn the downloaded iso. There no X Server running (yet) on the box so I was searching for a nice commandline utility.

I found cdw and it really looked nice so I installed it:

aptitude install cdw

After running it with “cdw” it detected my cd-writer so no configuration needed: nice. Because I once tried mybashburn (or something like that) and that piece of software needed all kinds of configuration. And I don’t like that.

I wanted to burn the debian sid iso with cdw but I couldn’t find an option for doing so. After some searching I found out that I had to go to “preferences” and change the value of “Default image file”. WTF? That’s not very nice I thought. But I tried it. But a no-go. The path to my iso was to long to fit in the box. So I couldn’t even select it.

Don’t get me wrong: cdw IS nice for burning music cd’s or just some files to backup. But isos…. pfff

So I resorted to cdrecord. It’s got a bit of a “hacker” feeling to it but it did the job nicely:

cdrecord driveropts=burnfree /home/leon/debian-live-sid-amd64-xfce-desktop.iso

What I don’t understand is why I have to manually enable burnfree. I mean: the last 5 cdr drives I had, all had burnfree. I’m doubting if they even make cd recorders without burnfree. So why not make it the default? Because apparently “Maybe it causes problems with *some* drives withput burn-free support”. Hja, retards.

But there might be a solution to this problem. Cdrecord checks for “/etc/cdrecord.conf”. And there you can change the default cdrecord parameters. My “/etc/cdrecord.conf” now contains:

driveropts=burnfree

But if it’s correct of if it works: I don’t know. I haven’t yet tested it.

This friday I got all the components of my new HTPC. With thanks to my boss

It consists of:

• Antec Veris Media Fusion Remote Silver
• Coolermaster 460WATT PSU ExtremePower Plus
• Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850E AM2
• MDT 2048 MB DDR2 800 / PC6400
• Asus EN8400GS/Silent/HTP 512MB PCI-E
• Scythe Ninja Mini
• Some old harddisk I had laying around
• Ubuntu server 8.10
• 15″ touchscreen

The Antec case really looks nice and seems to be built well. Especially the way the harddrives are suspended in mid air

I’ve now got the motherboard in the case and mounted the cooler on the cpu. I’ve attached the power-switch stuff, USB connections and mainpower of the motherboard. I still have the second videocard that has to be connected.

The powerswitch was a little tricky though. You have to connect the powerswitch not comming from the LCD display to the back of the display. And the powerswitch cable comming from the LCD has to be connected to the motherboard. But if you know it, it’s simple

I’m first going to install KVM for a Windows XP and Windows 2000 server installation. More on that in my next post.

The LCD display is nice but is a little hard to read. Maybe with some good software on my Ubuntu Linux 8.10 installation it gets better. If I manage to get something working I’ll post it here. For example the LCD display, fan monitoring and NVIDIA VPAU and AMD UVD2. Sure hops the latter two work.

Here’s a little impression of the work in progress:

I’ve had a couple of times now that on one of my computers df keeps reporting 100% disk usage. Until now I have resolved this issue by rebooting. But today this happened on one of our servers. And I was reluctant to boot and I had to solve it fast because mysql was down.

After some searching I found that it was because of a process keeping a hold of some deleted files. So after shuttding down some processes I found the right one and df reported a dropping disk usage %. After starting mysql again we were back up again.

Because I recently bought a new motorcycle I wanted to sell my old GS500. Most important when selling your stuff online: good pictures of the item you’re selling. So I dusted of my Nikon, gave my trusty Suzuki a nice cleaning and started taking pictures. With HDR in my mind I used a little tripod and took 3 pictures of every position with the bracketing function. +2EV, 0EV and -2EV. No raw but plain jpeg’s. For some reason I don’t like raws. It just takes too much time to get them ready for publishing.

I shot 10×3 pictures, uploaded them to my laptop and started looking for some HDR/tone-mapping software for linux. Qtpfsgui looked very nice and I tried it out. It was available from the ubuntu repositories. I have the Intrepid repositories enabled and installed hugin-tools (a dependency for qtpfsgui) from there. The added benefit was that qtpfsgui could align the pictures for you. I used a tripod but I didn’t use a remote control. So some pictures were not perfectly the same.

Qtpfsgui seemed like everything I needed: a nice gui, automatic aligning of images and a lot of different algorithms for creating tone mapped images.

But I couldn’t create a realistic tonemapped image. Qtpfsgui creates a lot of those fantasy-like HDR images. Nice if you like the style, but I wanted realistic images. Exit qtpfsgui.

After doing some more research I found a commandline utility called enfuse. There were some very positive and exciting comments on it, so I decided to check it out. I wanted enfuse, which is part of the enblend package on ubuntu. But the newest enblend package on Ubuntu was 3.0. And I needed something newer for enfuse to be part of it. So I had to compile it from source. What I did:

sudi aptitude install build-essential
sudo aptitude install pkg-config libtiff4-dev libboost-graph-dev libboost-thread1.34.1 liblcms1-dev libglew1.5-dev libplot-dev libglut3-dev libopenexr-dev libopenexr2ldbl libxi-dev
cd ~/src
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/enblend/enblend-enfuse-3.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf enblend-enfuse-*.tar.gz
cd enblend-enfuse-*
./configure
make

You can optionally do:

sudo make install

I decided to first try it from the build directory:

cd ~/Pictures/test
~/src/enblend-enfuse-3.2/src/enfuse DSC_080* -o enfuse_test.tiff

And it worked perfectly. Without any tweaking of the parameters, it resulted in a nicer, better looking image than with a fully tweaked qtpfsgui.

But…. what if your images aren’t perfectly aligned as in my case? Install the latest hugin-tools package which contains the align_image_stack program:

sudo aptitude install hugin-tools=0.7.0~svn3191+beta5-1ubuntu1
align_image_stack -a aligned_ DSC_080*
~/src/enblend-enfuse-3.2/src/enfuse aligned_* -o enfuse_test_2.tiff

Perfect! I would really recommend enfuse.

Maybe I’ll create a small ruby script to ease this process.

Ik heb twee hele lieve ratjes maar ze knagen alle losliggende kabels door
Nu was de Wii aan de beurt. Bijna alles weggewerkt of draadloos. Behalve de sensor bar natuurlijk. En ja hoor, die hadden ze te pakken genomen (op twee plekken zelfs). Dus ik dacht: dat wordt weer dure replacement parts bestellen bij Ninentendo. Maar…. nee hoor! Een nieuwe sensorbar kost bij Nintendo 10 dollar. Dat is omgerekend zo’n 50 eurocent of zoiets

Ook zijn bij Bol wireless sensor bars te bestellen (een stuk of vijf verschillende).

En natuurlijk draait een beetje klusser er zijn hand niet voor om om de draadjes weer aan elkaar te solderen. Ik dat gedaan, maar dat werkte niet

Na wat zoeken op internet bleek dat er nog een soort coating over de draadjes zit. Die moet je er eerst even afbranden en dan werkt het perfect! Met dank aan deze guide.